05.22.11

Summary: Under the leadership of AttachMSFT, Novell products still fail to maintain their userbase

AttachMSFT would love to make it seem like it should be trusted. Oracle did the same thing when it acquired Sun. It makes business sense to always make everything appear healthy, even when it is not. Just watch the latest news headlines for very recent examples of that [1, 2]. There is a diversion from discussion about the layoffs.

This whole Microsoft-Novell deal and AttachMSFT acquisition is turning out pretty well for Microsoft. It is not a good time for those who developed for Novell platforms. Yes, Novell is mentioned in this press release too. Condrey Corporation seems to be targeting a dying platform. What have we seen from AttachMSFT so far (except layoffs)?

The SD Times publishes the results of some survey which compares Novell to Microsoft:

Zeichick’s Take: Novell is (was) super-stodgy; Microsoft, not so much

That’s the result of a highly nonscientific survey, conducted over the past couple of months, by yours truly. As you may recall from my Feb. 7 column, “Stodgy old Microsoft,” a radio analyst referred to the folks in Redmond that way during a story about their quarterly returns.

It’s time to share the complete results. Several hundred people filled out the survey, which was linked in my column, tweeted out and put on Facebook. Although there was no statistical rigor, the rankings are revealing.

At Novell’s peak in the ’90s, 70 percent of the world’s computer networks were run with its system management software. More recently, the company’s fortunes have faded under pressure from Microsoft and other Web-based competitors — prompting Novell to try to reinvent itself as a distributor of the free Linux operating system.

Novell chose to be crushed in Microsoft’s hands rather than liaise with Microsoft’s rivals. It was foolish judgment. What Novell then descended to is the selling of Novell’s acquired proprietary software which sometimes targeted SUSE or only Windows [1, 2, 3]. It hardly promotes the use of GNU/Linux. Later on Novell also pushed Fog Computing (it is still doing this), which is no better than proprietary, even if it is offered gratis (initially). We may never really know just how those leaderless products perform under AttachMSFT’s wing because it’s a private and fairly secretive company.█

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